In this video excerpt, learn how email marketing is one of the most effective ways to quickly test your value proposition with your customers rather than relying on company logic to determine the best way to sell to them. Email marketing, he argued, cultivates testing.

Ease of change

Email marketing is easy to change. Unlike traditional marketing channels, with a couple of clicks, an entire message can be changed. A headline, copy, a postscript, everything in an email is easily adaptable, easily changed, easily tested. If you want to find out what motivates a customer, just see which email they open.

Large sample size

Additionally, email marketing can produce a large sample size if your list is big enough. This allows a marketer to test different value propositions across different segments to see what resonates and what flops. Austin reiterated numerous times, “the goal of a test is not simply to get a lift, but to get a learning,” which indicates some tests will be more successful than others, but it’s all in an effort to put a face on your customers.

Do you stand out in the inbox?

Email also cultivates a highly competitive environment, where every company a customer is subscribed to is also attempting to get the customer to open its email. However, if a typical customer is anything like you or me, getting 20 or more emails a day from different companies, they’re selective about which emails they open, let alone click through. Discovering what value motivates your customer to open the email, or respond to its call-to-action, is a breakthrough.

We already do it

Lastly, Austin argued that in your marketing campaign, chances are, you are already sending out emails, so why not use that to test your value proposition? We should always strive to better understand our customer, and in particular, to understand the essence of our value proposition. By using your pre-existing list and testing on an email platform that is used daily, split testing can easily be incorporated into a marketer’s everyday routine.

As many presenters at Email Summit 2013 said, the goal of any email is to start a conversation with your customer. Knowing the customer you are reaching out to and discovering what motivates them by testing and evaluating your value proposition, Austin argued, is a powerful and relatively easy way to make significant changes in the way your company starts that conversation.